What is humanity building towards?

Extinction, unless we stop doing business as usual and have a major drawdown soon (although that doesn't seem likely). Or at least collapse enough that it's pretty darn close to extinction.

There will be some neat technology leading up to it, though. At least the next 10-20 years. So that'll be fun. Maybe a couple new web frameworks people will get excited about.

[1]: https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment-and-conserv...

[2]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-are-doomed...

More of the same.

1,000 years ago most people lived their lives as much as they had to and lived their fantasies as much as thy could. 1,000 years from now, the same will apply.

The especially special standout of our period in time is that we think our fantasies are shared more widely than they are. The delusion isn't different in degree than people expecting the Biblical Apocalypse 1,000 years ago, and our descendants will have their own delusions they'll hold with as much fervor and as little reason.

> it seems that collectively, we are striving for something somewhat cohesively

I don't think so. Humanity isn't some uniformly distributed / synergistic / perfectly aligned entity. It's a mess of individuals, small groups and large groups with different incentives each one of them pulling and pushing in a different direction.

As far as I can tell, we seem to be striving towards developing the most efficient means to have our attention subverted.

I think we're getting better at creating collective intelligence. Every way we come up with to organize or connect a group of people is some kind of collective intelligence. Some are more intelligent than others (e.g. World cafe method), some are mostly counter productive (e.g. today's Social Media), but we're learning from our mistakes. If some groups are much better in organizing themselves than others, these others will find out and adapt the approach. That means we're having some kind of evolution of collective intelligence at play. Look how small amd large tech organizations organize themselves to work towards a goal. Popular approches get shared and modified. Some prominent examples are: Google uses OKRs, Amazon uses small independent teams, Microsoft uses internal open source collaboration.

At some point, collective intelligence will be used to explicitly create better collective Intelligence systems. I believe that if humanity reaches that point, our species will survive and thrive. If we don't, we'll go extinct.

But I'm optimistic and think reaching that point in the near future is realistic. If only a company with enough resources realizes that they can combine the brains of their employees to create something more intelligent, they would have a huge competitive advantage. And that's worth working on.

If you're working on collective intelligence systems, too, please reach out.

I figure we're working towards the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter.

A good friend of mine once cynically told me that academia is largely driven by narcissism. He was only half-serious, and it was probably more an expression of his frustration with his work, but that quote always stuck with me, because it does help to explain why very talented people would stay in a gruesome, relatiely low-paying field. This I think also applies to a decent degree to entrepreneurship, politicians and ambitious career people at Fortune companies. So assuming this as a primary motivating factor, I'd say humanity is building towards whatever serves the glorification of the ego of its most successful narcissists.

Phrased less cynically, we are all building our own little future, and humanity is the some of our constituent parts.

To also give a more pragmatic answer to your question, I think we are progressing fastly towards a global society, with centralisation of both private sector and state power in the hands of a few elites. States are generally becoming more authoritarian, while companies are becoming ever larger and more complicated. We are already in a situation in which the largest companies can take on smaller countries in "asymmetric warfare", and I think this will just escalate with less borders and a potentially shrinking cake due to climate change and changing demographics.

More, faster, bigger (or smaller depending), better (for pretty much anything) - for the lucky ones

living paycheck to paycheck for most. Hopping their children will be in first category.

Just trying to survive for the most unfortunate ones.

I see our world as a computer with 7.753 Billion "brain processing units". Until now, most processing units were using all their cycles and memory on { get food, don't die, maybe kill others }. As we evolve, and more humans have better lives, and more time/money, those shift towards better things { math, astrophysics, games, general fun and enjoyment }. I'm not saying humans never had fun or studied math until now. I'm saying that per capita, more math and fun is being done now than ever before in human history.

In short, we're maximizing the math/fun utilization per brain. This has all kinds of side effects, like galactic colonization.

For some amazing statistics on "what we're building towards" I recommend looking at Hans Rosling's TED talk, where he describes how civilization is becoming better (over time) by every single measurable metric.

Humanity is trending toward the extraction of as much work as possible from any available differences of temperature. In our wake, we will leave unavailable energy and chaos, every mountain leveled and every hole filled in.

This goal has driven all of life. We were born with the impulse, it drives evolution itself. It's why we reproduce. It's why we invade new lands. It's why we dream of Dyson Spheres. It's why we dig up fossil sunshine and will continue that project until it kills us.

But some other life will get the same idea and carry on after we fail.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-support-for-a-physics-t...

Well we make a lot of long lived chemicals that are toxic to complex life, then spray/spill/dump/burn them all over. I'd say humanity is sort of undertaking the project of making the first few feet of earth's crust into a superfund site. Convenient because it suggests a subsequent massive heroic project to somehow clean it all up later this century which is the kind of tragic futile project we fall in love with as a species.

Artificial bodies. Our deep-seated bias towards compassion has led us to subvert natural selection through medicine (and I say this as someone who likely would not survive a few centuries ago). We will continue to decline physically as a species and require more and more interventions immediately after birth. At some point we'll probably do away with old-school reproduction altogether.

life repeats itself in different scales (tech does too). First was the cell, then the colony, organisms, cities, countries etc. right now we are building some mold in one of the planets with water. Next will probably be some interstellar or galaxy-wide organism.

I'm surprised to see no mentions of AGI here. Imagine automatic, AI directed scientific research and study. The combined written intelligence of all of us on every project. It could solve every problem that we face today, and that's not hyperbole.

>Judging from technological growth and general activity, it seems that collectively, we are striving for something somewhat cohesively? What could it be?

I would say what all animals naturally work towards: survival and to perpetuate the species.

We aren't building towards anything. Or rather, we are collectively building towards 8 billion different things.

Some larger-scale themes: Getting off of the planet. Reducing poverty. Renewable energy. Knowledge available to everyone.

There's an old science fiction short story with humans and other species eventually leaving the planet, like a baby emerging from the womb, and becoming wise old aliens.

This is fiction. We aren't striving for anything.

I believe our genetic predisposition to invent and bring order to chaos was genetically engineered. It is our fixation as a species. I think the aliens have remote control ships that are hidden deep within the ocean. I think they use them to intervene and keep humanity alive and productive. There are probably many worlds like ours being harvested for technology. We are livestock.

Nothing.

We've abandoned all big science, technology and engineering projects in favour of comfort and entertainment.

I'll say this for the USSR, they had big goals at least. That's all gone now because people don't want it. They want a slightly larger house or a quicker rate of change of fashion or more extravagant sports contests (eg the Iraq war 3)

Hegemony, superiority over others at any cost.

The creation of 15 million bolos; each allowing a different form of life, eliminating nonconsensual labor, war, and ecocide. (https://libcom.org/library/pm-bolobolo)

Climate disaster.

Basically nonstop advertising

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Widespread apathy.

People less willing to work, vote, socialise, or just plain live.

Understanding. The ability to look at the natural world and say "now just what the hell is going on here exactly". On that front we make progress, slowly.

both figuratively and literally leaving the planet

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-mars_n_3359773

or mayhaps a shift in consciousness

https://www.ecoliteracy.org/article/great-turning

The power to survive , but in general, power.

And that drives the process of evolution(biological, economical, technological, others), towards more complexity.

The only thing that comes to mind is efficiency being the not-rose-colored version of progress. Efficiency of what though? Largely capitalism. Neither efficiency nor capitalism are goals, but rather they are the framework that the 'developed' western world operate within.

So basically there were some rules made up for the game we'll be playing during our lives. Those rules get indoctrinated within us, then we try to fulfill our inner desires and imagined goals using those rules, following them, breaking them, sometimes reinterpreting them, etc.

On the plus side, if we look back several hundred years we like what we have today better, so hopefully in another few hundred years things will be even better.

I'll be that guy: Cyberpunk, Biopunk and, despite the cliché, the Metaverse.

I really hope it won't be the Zuckerberg version, and I'm not talking about weird crypto schemes, VR/AR goggles or Pokémon Go. I mean the original idea as described in 80s sci-fi novels, Ghost in the Shell, Matrix, Avatar, etc: Brain implants that let you plug into some kind of fully immersive VR world (or alternatively, a remote-controlled robot body in the real world) and gives you an experience indistinguishable from reality.

I don't think there are many people that consciously want this future (except maybe furries, trans folks and tech billionaires), but there seems to be a remarkable number of both push and pull factors that move us into that direction:

- The technology seems to become increasingly feasible (in the next decades) : Biotechnology is already one of the most active and well-funded areas of research and the pandemic will only increase this development.

- A significant number of common "first-world problems" seem to be about body image: Beauty standards, gender identity, but also disabilities or age. I think the ability to design your own body as you see fit or to swap it out as we are changing clothing today will have an allure that should not be underestimated - especially in an individualistic and narcissistic society.

- Humans are overtaken by machines in an increasing number of areas, even without some kind of killer AI: Today, our machines can travel to other planets, explore physically plausible 4D spaces, trade in milliseconds or simply skip arbitrary amounts of time in standby. Only humans are stuck in the old world. Turning people into cyborgs might be an attempt to bring humans back into the loop here.

- Most of us are already spending a significant part of our lives in virtual worlds - social networks, chats, etc - but we do so in an awkward way that requires us to constantly divide our attention. Calls for "digital detox", going analog, etc are numerous but don't really seem to lead to much. Going the opposite direction - going fully virtual - could be an attempt to solve the attention problem.

- The current streak of "bad years" is unlikely to stop anytime soon and the real world will likely become a more unpleasant place than it was during the end of the 20th century: Either we'll be hit by the full force of climate change - or we'll voluntary restrict ourselves to avert the worst. In either case, the world will be less inviting and less free to explore than it used to be. So the desire to escape to a different world will likely grow stronger.

- Governments and corporations will probably be in favour of a Metaverse as at least a centralised version of it would greatly simplify social control.

I think there are some fascinating aspects to all of this, but there are also lots of obvious ways how this could turn into a dystopia. At the very least, if it should come to this, "decentralisation" will be a fundamental necessity and not just a crypto catch phrase - otherwise, we can quickly end up in a world where FAANG pushes "bug fixes and performance improvements" to your brain and where you'll be physically unable to sing "Happy Birthday" without a Spotify subscription.

Zoom back a few billion years. You have some stars, planets, celestial bodies. There is no complexity. Nothing will change. Astrophysics is done mostly on Newtonian physics, because it's so predictable.

Zoom forward to life. Life is more interesting. It tries to do things. You had early creatures that evolve arms and these arms were also their throats and mouths. You had creatures invent all kinds of weird senses, like being able to see electricity. There was the dinosaur era where creatures wanted big powerful bodies. Sharks were megasharks.

At this point the most complex thing in the Solar System was life. Not the sun or planets or some whirly space dust. Life was highly unpredictable and interesting.

Now fast forward to humans. Humans learned tools. They stat dumped claws, poison, and monkey muscle. They became really focused, eyes in front of their heads instead of the sides. Just became really good at making tools and using it as an extension of the body. Animals can make tools, but it doesn't meld into the brain like it does with humans.

Tools opened up a whole different layer of complexity. You get spears, then swords, hammers, houses, concrete, so on. You use tools to build more tools.

Somehow we became extremely complex creatures. And we've learned to deal with that complexity as well - statistics, systems, game theory, theology.

18th century, we invented economics. Simply put, wealth wasn't gold and silver, it was production. The idea that if humans were productive, they'd be wealthier. Wars slowed down a lot because you didn't have to kill each other for gold. Equality improved, because you'd have more productivity with willing employees than you would from slaves. And we got into this grand idea that we should just make everyone productive! Education, health care, free people in jobs, emancipation. This is the birth of modern civilization.

20th century, we got really good at tools making tools. Now you have programming. Punch cards, then Assembly, C, operating systems. You use an operating system and a programming language to make better operating systems and languages!

Then CAD. Build better processors. Build better software with these processors. Build better hardware with the better software! What is this wizardry?

And we've had these loops in every other field. We made humans last longer. Life expectancy was less than 50 in 1900. So humans grew older, became more experienced, became better doctors, better teachers and professors. We've had advancements in farming, so things were not as doomed as Malthus predicted.

While software and hardware is slowing down, this tools making more tools opens new doors. Genetic engineering is close. We're hitting advances in energy, efficient cars, rockets. That thing with creatures spending millions of years engineering themselves, we should be able to do that in a few years.

If we ever do figure out space colonization, we'll inflict all kinds of chaos. Stars are predictable over the span of billions of years. But give humans ten thousand more years and who knows what we could do to the stars?

tl;dr: We're always racing to become more complex and interesting, and humanity as a whole will continue to be unpredictable.

The spaceship in WALL-E but with Metaverse VR pr0n.